by Jamie Jones
Him: ‘Let me play you a recording of a call you made to a customer last week.’
As the sound of my voice filled the room, I realised that the call he was playing was to a man who gave me no real reason why he couldn’t pay his mortgage but during our conversation, revealed that he was a Posh fan. As Big Boss and I sat and listened to 5 minutes of us discussing everything from Posh’s current form to whether or not we needed a new striker, I felt my face going first red, then scarlet. I knew what was coming, as Big Boss turned up the volume on the speakers and gave me a steely eyed smirk. I brought the call to an end by saying cheerily:
‘Look, you’re only £3000 behind, I will just make a note on the system to say that you are trying to pay and to give you another couple of months. Nobody here will notice for a while. Anyway, what’s a few more weeks going to hurt, I’m sure you’ll pay it in the end.
Ok then mate. Yeah, good talking to you as well. Up The Posh.’
I wanted to burst out laughing as Big Boss and I sat there with the dialling tone buzzing in our ears. He didn’t laugh though. He issued me with a final written warning. I had only been there for 3 weeks and hadn’t had any other warnings, written or otherwise, but it didn’t feel like the right time to argue with him over HR policy. I knew then that, although I needed to keep the job in order to continue to bank my salary of £12,500 a year, I also needed to get on with finding a position elsewhere.
My permanent employment and salary meant that Dad could get on with badgering me into doing the two things that, following my degree, he wanted me to do most in life. Namely buy a car and leave home (for good).
My buying of a car was born out of necessity that December. Since I’d started work back in Peterborough, my old mate Doods had been giving me a lift to work and back. This scenario worked out fine until I walked into his house one morning and asked:
Me ‘Where’s your car, Doods?’
Doods: ‘In the usual place.’
Me: ‘No it’s not.’
Doods: ‘Stop being a knob, it’s freezing cold and I’ve got a blinding hangover.’
Me: ‘Honestly mate, it’s not in the usual place.’
Doods: ‘If you’re messing me about, Jay, I swear, I am going to batter you.’
We walked out to the usual place with me saying, ‘It’s not there, it’s not there’ to find that, as I had been saying, the car wasn’t there. I resisted the temptation to say ‘I told you.’ Fortunately the police did find Doods car a week later, unfortunately it was after a boat had got stuck on its roof in the local river.
I bought my first car, an ageing Renault Clio, the following week with all the cash that I had in the world and my first bank loan. My dad was a picture of brooding delight as I handed over the money at the garage. I knew that he was thinking:
‘No more living like a student for you my boy, this is the real world now. You can experience some of my life, with its bank loans and moaning about the price of car insurance.’
That Christmas was a strange time. I finally had a half decent job, a few quid in my pocket and was back home with my mates and my family. The problem was that I still had an Amy shaped hole in my life. I spent far more time thinking about her now that we were apart than I ever did when we were together. Maybe that was the problem neatly summed up right there.
I knew that I had to put our relationship behind me and get on with my life but I was enjoying playing the heartbroken, sensitive victim. It wasn’t an act as such but it was a piece of Mozesque drama that suited my battered personality perfectly. My family and mates weren’t enjoying my wallowing but I wasn’t bothered. I got to sit in my room, listen to my music and feel that the words of Morrissey and Billy Bragg were full of meaning (for a self-centred tosspot).
I spent Christmas morning convinced that Amy would ring and say that she had made a terrible mistake and that we should get back together. I’ve no idea why I thought Christmas Day was going to provoke such a realisation in her but, by mid-afternoon, I’d grudgingly accepted that she wasn’t going to ring. I sat at the table for dinner, with a party hat perched wonkily on my head, desperate to get back upstairs, back to my music, while the festivities whirled around me.
1999
Moving On (By Sitting in My Pants & Listening to Moz)
1999 opened miserably. I’d never been a fan of New Year’s Eve, all those once a year revellers out cluttering up the streets, imploring everyone to have a great time. It was a Peterborough tradition to leave whichever crappy club you were in at 11.45pm and head to a freezing Cathedral Square. There, surrounded by other drunken revellers, we would celebrate the coming of the new year by hugging and kissing complete strangers. We had been doing the same thing for every NYE since 1992, but as 1998 became 1999, I’d had enough of this forced fun. I would happily have thrown myself off Town Bridge and into the River Nene rather than have to wish any more strangers “Happy New Year” or listen to the sound of Prince’s “1999” being played in every bar and club on endless repeat. The rest of the world could party like it was 1999 if it wanted to, but I stood in the cold of Cathedral Square and daydreamed about being at home in bed with a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich, listening to “Strangeways Here We Come”. In the end, that thought proved irresistible and I slipped away from the square at five to midnight. I saw in the New Year by walking home alone through the deserted city centre streets. That suited me just fine.
The early weeks of the year were alive with talk of how different the world would be in a years’ time with the dawning of a new millennium. I wasn’t excited, it would be just another year. As Morrissey stated: “The year 2000 won’t change anything, someone will still need to work in Woolworths”.
I wasn’t interested in any of the new music that was being released, so spent my time and money buying old albums. It was during a trip to HMV in January, that I stumbled across Johnny Cash – “Live At Folsom Prison” on CD for just £5.99. I figured that for such a bargain price I was duty bound to buy it. I had known of Johnny Cash previously of course, but this album was to elevate him in my eyes to legendary status: right up there with The Charlatans, The Stone Roses and just below Morrissey and Billy Bragg. Folsom was the ultimate live album, a country minstrel singing songs of love, loss and wrongdoing to a room full of convicts. The crowd interaction and their joy at hearing the songs is stunning. When he opens the show with “Folsom Prison Blues”, you can almost hear the prison guards shuffling nervously, not knowing whether Cash or the inmates were the bigger danger. The man was the ultimate crowd pleaser and that crowd on that day absolutely adored him. I would lay under my desk and howl along to the likes of “Cocaine Blues” and “Orange Blossom Special”. It lifted my spirits and convinced me that I needed to get on with my life. Amy had gone but, with the whole world ahead of me or, at the very least, a city within which surely someone would fancy me in the darkened corners of a nightclub?
I made the trip to Cambridge in February to meet Amy for what was now becoming a regular lunch meeting. Before I’d had much of a chance to say anything, she blurted out that she was moving in with her new fella. I realised in that instant that she had started on her adult life while I was still spending hours wondering what my favourite track on “The Queen is Dead” was.
I knew that my lack of horror, grief or tears upon hearing her news meant that I was finally ready to move on. As we walked along the river, I told her that I was over her, that I was moving on as well and that I hoped we could both be happy. I meant every word. I had loved her, in reality probably still loved her and really did want her to be happy. It was the first slice of maturity that I had served up in years. She made a face that, in all the time I’d known her, I hadn’t seen her make before. It was somewhere between relief and sadness. Either that or she’d bitten her tongue.
Our hug goodbye that day was a little tighter than it had been for at least two years, as it dawned on us both that we would now inevitably drift apart. We vowed to stay friends but the reality was
that life had different plans for us. I didn’t have a master plan. I didn’t have a plan at all but I knew I needed to stop looking back and start stumbling blindly forward.
On the train home I formulated a double-barrelled course of action, one of which was to start seeing someone new and the other was to move out of my parents’ house. I wasn’t planning on changing my personality and start chatting up women, so the first one would have to take care of itself eventually. The second one, though, I could put into practice.
I had first left home when I moved to Hereford and then Cardiff in 1995. I had gone away, grown up to a certain extent and came home after my time at university was over. It was tough for Mum and I to live back under the same roof. I had got used to living my life exactly the way that I wanted to. I wasn’t happy to get tutted at or questioned every time I got a bottle of lager (that I’d bought) out of the fridge or starting World War III by taking the wrong size towel out of the airing cupboard. Mum had used the time that I was away to de-Jay her house and get it exactly how she wanted it. As much as she loved me, she was struggling with my rolling back into town and leaving toast crumbs all over her kitchen work tops. At a surprisingly calm dinner table discussion, Mum and I agreed that it was time for me to move out permanently.
Jacko was having much the same conversation with his mum, so we set about finding both a suitable house for us to move into and an extra housemate to help pay the bills. With Doody having already moved in with our mate Deano, that ruled him out. In the end, we decided to invite a lad we knew from football and nights out, called Ally, to move into the comfortable 3 bed semi-detached house that we had found to rent. I knew Jacko inside out thanks to our years of being mates, but living with Ally was an eye-opener. He was four years older than us but didn’t appear to own anything in the world other than his clothes and a Tottenham Hotspur alarm clock. He took the box room as it was the cheapest and he didn’t have anything to put in it.
We moved in at the end of March and it was revelation to have my own space again, living life how I wanted to. Not that I did anything rebellious or radical, but if I wanted to spend a Sunday sat in my pants, in bed, drinking tea and listening to Morrissey, I could. At times our house resembled a football dressing room, both in the number of lads that would be in it and the relentless mickey-taking that would take place. Weekends or weeknights, ours became the house that all our mates would head to before or after a night out. We had some funny old times, from me nearly burning the house down when leaving a pizza under the grill and falling into a drunken coma at 3am, through to our mate Gaz deciding that 5am on a Sunday morning was the ideal time to strip naked and play golf on our front lawn.
Even up in my room, I wasn’t safe from visitors. I would occasionally attempt to sneak up there, turn off the lights, draw the curtains and relax with a bottle of lager and The Smiths. I never got the chance to wallow for long though, as one of the lads would wander up the stairs to the bathroom and barge into my room to ask; ‘What the bloody hell are you doing up here on your own in the dark? Get downstairs and watch the second half of the football, man.’
The 3 of us, along with the majority of our mates, all played for the same Sunday league team. The games that we played and, most importantly, the days out in the pub after the final whistle were some of the funniest times of my life. Winning or losing football matches with your mates, helping each other out, whether that’s defending a corner or defending each other in a 22 man brawl, the sense of camaraderie was life-affirming. It was a time when none of us had any responsibilities, unless you counted the need to get up for work on a Monday morning. Our pre-match plans would start with meeting in one of Peterborough’s pubs on the Saturday night, party at Deano’s or ours after nightclub chucking out time, crash out at 4am, up at 8.30am to play football and then de-camp to our local pub, The Whittle Way, as soon as we had showered after the game. We would stay there watching football, laughing and joking until we fell over. It was a simple but bloody fun way of living life.
Moving into the house, and the football days out had helped me put both Amy and Cardiff to the back of my mind, As winter eased into spring, we decided that the ideal summer holiday would be a trip to Bulgaria, to incorporate some time around the pool and take in the game England were playing in the capital. Despite our hotel being in Sunny Beach, some 225 miles from Sofia, we booked it knowing that somehow we would find transport to get us to and from the match. We were all in our early 20’s, we didn’t worry about such things. Of far more interest was that it was boiling hot, our hotel was on the beachfront and beer was only 30p a pint. We arrived and immediately hit it hard. On the first night, Deano and I ended up fully clothed in the sea and then on a tourist car-train that stopped mysteriously in the middle of some woods. As we were the only passengers and the driver, who looked very unhappy, was heading our way, we decided to run back into town despite appearing to be too drunk to stand. The lads were all delighted to see us when we returned.
Deano ended the night drinking his pint whilst sat in the pool at 6am, despite the hotel staff insisting he would “die from chemical we put in pool”. I’d slunk off to my room and redecorated the walls and floor of our bathroom. The rest of the holiday continued in much the same vein. I felt like a different person, like I had shrugged off the miserable git that I had been for far too long and was now prepared to put myself out there and enjoy what adventures life had to offer. Whether it was Doody spending a night asleep in the woods or ‘Tommy’ the hotel barman taking us to this strange open air nightclub in the hills surrounding the resort, where he insisted that no foreign tourists had ever been before, it was a mad old holiday.
On the day of the England game in Sofia, we paid £40 each to board a plane chartered by one of the local bar owners to take us to the capital. The plane journey from Stansted to Bulgaria had been my first so I was still a little nervous about flying, particularly as the bar owner laughed heartily when I asked him which airport we would be flying from. We were piled into an ancient bus, along with England fans from neighbouring hotels and driven out to a field in the middle of nowhere. There we set eyes on our plane. I hadn’t seen anything like it since the last time I’d watched one of the Indiana Jones films. We stood there, open mouthed, looking at the dual propellers that were to power this 50 seater plane. None of us got onboard thinking we would ever see our hotel again, let alone the green and pleasant land that we called home.
Thankfully we made it to Sofia in one piece and had time for a few friendly drinks with the locals before watching England play out a decent 1-1 draw. The few beers that we had gulped down ensured that our plane was full of male bravado for the return trip to Sunny Beach. Whereas we had flown to Sofia in a stunned, worried silence, we flew back to laughter and lots of “I knew this plane would be fine, course I did, never a problem for me.”
We returned to England 48 hours later, with tales to tell and smiles on our faces. I couldn’t have asked for any more from a holiday.
My soundtrack to that summer was the new Suede album “Head Music”. It clearly wasn’t Suede’s album, in fact it was nowhere near the standard set by their debut, “Dog Man Star” or “Coming Up”. It was a glittering summer album, jam-packed full of huge indie pop anthems. It was a bright light in what was a grim year for new music. With the Slade-esque stomp of “Can’t Get Enough” and the sway along majesty of “Everything Will Flow”, it was an album that I would listen to at least once a day. I was determined to follow on from moving into our house and Bulgaria by enjoying the rest of the summer, and “Head Music” was the glorious musical accompaniment. The only other new albums that got airtime in my room were; The Chemical Brothers “Surrender”, Shack “HMS Fable” and Mogwai’s sublime “Come On Die Young”.
That Morris Man You Like
DESPITE my previous run-in with the Big Boss, I had managed to keep hold of my job and was even beginning to flourish. It was a role that could mess with your brain if you let it, talking to people about
their mortgage arrears and potential repossessions all day. We would regularly hear agonising tales of genuine tragedy from customers, as well as receiving threats of violence and the “I know where you live, you wanker” responses to our phone calls. Amongst the 10 of us on the Collections section we forged a team spirit which would invariably see us lightening our collective mood in the pub after work on a Friday. It was on one of these pub trips that I ended up chatting to Vicky, who was our Team Leader and thus my boss. She was friendly, seemed reasonably well adjusted and was easy to talk banal rubbish to. By the 3rd drink she was telling me how her ex-boyfriend had left her, that she didn’t think she would ever find anyone ever again and that she now lived on her own. She was on the ‘talking rubbish’ side of tipsy so I didn’t think anything of her shouting into my ear, over the noise of one of our lot murdering “Sit Down” on the karaoke:
‘You’re such a good listener, how are you single? If I were 5 years younger….’
Our Friday night work trips to the pub were often supplemented by members of our team bumping into each other on Saturday night trips to the meat markets of the city centre. It was on such a night, in 5th Avenue, that I bumped into Vicky and we shared a round of Tequila Slammers at the bar. She paid for them, she was my boss after all. Buoyed by the alcoholic slap round the face, we stumbled onto the packed dancefloor. After the fog cleared in my head, I indicated by the use of universally recognised nightclub sign language that, “I don’t dance” and that I was going back to the bar. I didn’t expect her to follow me, but she did by putting her hand inside mine to negotiate the writhing mass of bodies that were between us and another drink. It was only as she held my hand that I even got an inkling that something might happen between us. She was my boss and she was a fully fledged woman being 28 to my 23. Vicky was petite and (just about) 5 foot tall, with a cute face and dirty blonde bob. In many ways she looked like Amy, but six inches shorter. We carried on talking, ordering ridiculously priced shots and ignoring the gyrating bodies around us and in a darkened corner of the club, at the traditional kissing time of 1.50am, the inevitable happened.